That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won’t be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
As a person who really gets stuck in his ways and hates having to change things if I don’t have to, here I am on Lemmy. I’m ready to settle in.
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn’t had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I’m not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
Hi! I’m an admin of fanaticus.social. I’d like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It’s back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.
We’re working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.
The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can’t do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.
I miss a lot of my favourite smaller subreddits too. There’s way more now popping up then there was a few weeks ago so it is getting better. It’ll take time for communities to grow, we can’t expect it to be instantly like our fave subreddits were right off the bat. We have to remember that our niche subreddits started small as well at one point. Also consider doing some posting in those slow communities yourself to get the ball rolling. I’ve noticed it takes someone else commenting and providing content before other people feel brave enough to join in too. Kind of like no one wanting to be the first or only person on the dance floor. Once a couple people get in there and begin dancing others join too.
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
I’m in the same boat. I don’t particularly mind using reddit during my work day because I can still do that in a web browser via old.reddit and RES. I honestly have no clue what new reddit even really looks like because my user experience hasn’t changed in YEARS.
But I’m bitter as fuck about my personal time wasting ritual outside of work being seized from me. I’ve used their app a handful of times for different things and it’s fucking abysmal. I’m just not interested at all in using it. I feel like a smoker being forced to quit. The period between now and whenever a “sync for lemmy” app is released is going to be long and painful.
But I’m here, and will do what I can to help this platform become something better. It’s been incredible to watch it grow over a period of weeks. It felt so empty 4-6 weeks ago. Now it kinda has a “dorm move in day vibe.” Boxes strewn about, doors propped open, everyone sorta mingling and chatting, asking/answering questions, giving tips, and a general air of excitement. Pretty cool.
It’s been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.
I’m not sure if Reddit will “die off”. There seems to be a significant portion of users who don’t care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they’ve been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
When I’ve checked the Reddit home page in the last few days (using an ad blocker of course, or sometimes an alternative Reddit front-end), it looks like stuff is still being posted.
Hopefully Reddit will feel more pain that persuades it to change course at least a little bit. But I won’t believe that the pain is happening until I see it. Unfortunately it seems to me that there are some Reddit users who just want to watch the funny videos and don’t care about Reddit’s poor behaviour.
“That’s why we’ve spent the past few weeks threatening and strong arming them. Now please, shut up and get back to work.”
Also: we’re still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting… we’re going to have to replace you with PAID moderators… and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh… shut up and get back to work for free!
After being a Lemmy lurker for a few weeks, I submitted a request for an account on an instance that manually approves accounts earlier this week. Just checked and confirmed that my account was approved. This was based on calls for engagement to help grow the community. While I’ve been here for a bit, here’s my first participation. Ayo!
Reddit CEO calls unpaid moderators’ concerns “noise”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg
This is abusing volunteers. If there are 140,000 active subreddits and if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits. They can close the subreddits, pay someone to moderate, try to pawn them off on a new sucker, or have bots run the subreddits. The question is, in the meantime, will the spammers abuse Reddit like their mods are being abused by Reddit? Let Reddit deal with these problems. If you’re a mod, why are you giving your time away for free to a company that doesn’t care about you?
If you’re a mod, I get that you care about your subreddit, but why waste your talent on someone who thinks your concerns are just noise?
The Minecraft Devs left Reddit:
Leave Reddit? To quote Din Djarin, “This is the way.”
if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits
Not exactly. Most subs have more than 1 moderator.
Plus tons of mods moderate many subreddits. It’d be a much more complex statistic
Many subs do, but not all mods do all things. /r/AskReddit has about 41 million subscribers, 71,479 comments + 3,669 posts per day (or 75,148 total) https://subredditstats.com/r/AskReddit They have 34 moderators https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/moderators How many submissions that don’t survive are SPAM? If you’re a spammer and you hit an active subreddit like that, it could help market your porn site a ton. If /r/AskReddit lost 10% of their moderators that’s 3 or 4 mods. That would hurt. Not that /r/AskReddit is protesting.
Reddit appears ready to toss out moderators who do not cave in. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23778997/reddit-remove-mods-private-communities-unless-reopen Surely the old “If all the mods become inactive for at least 60 days, someone can request the sub on r/redditrequest. The first person who requests it gets it.” I’m sure they will want to backfill positions but on highly active subreddits, that could be a daunting task and I guess we’ll see what hits the fan.
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product’s users and mods to be a winning strategy.
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product
s users and modsto be a winning strategy.
FTFY.
The users are the product being sold to the advertisers. Framed that way, it makes it even more clear how idiotic driving away users is.
